We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on human flaws such as greed and indecisiveness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote critiques human nature, illustrating how our weaknesses—greed (avarice), lack of commitment (hesitation), and blind conformity (following)—affect our lives and decisions. He characterizes humanity as 'puny and fickle,' suggesting that these traits lead to a lack of authenticity and progress in our actions and choices.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth and self-improvement.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Knowledge must come through action. You can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.
When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we'll find that more areas of our lives are workable. AS we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others-what and whom we can work with, and how-becomes wider.
The easiest thing to do in the world is to neglect the important and give in to the urgent.
Learn to humble yourself, you are but earth and clay.
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